Farma: Speculative Gastronomy
Despite years on the defensive, GMOs and other food technology can improve human and planetary health. A new restaurant is embracing this potential.
Xander Balwit, editor-in-chief of Asimov Press, writes about a restaurant that is bullish on GMOs and other food technology for Issue 04.
When one considers the millions of permutations of foods and wines to test, it is easy to see that life is too short for the formulation of dogma.
— A.J. Liebling, In Between Meals
Since their conception, GMOs have faced resistance. Their reputation has long been sullied as unnatural or even murderous. Environmentalists and activists have slandered GMO seeds as the weapons of Big Ag and the destroyer of the smallholder farmer. Efforts to introduce genetically modified crops into circulation have been lambasted as “Farmageddon” and their harvests as “Frankenfoods.” From their first intrepid steps into the fields, GM crops have become a scapegoat for distrust in science and its overextension into formerly “unadulterated” products. Genetic engineering in the medicine cabinet is one thing; allowing it at the dinner table is another.
Farma, an innovative GMO and food technology-friendly restaurant has decided that the time has come to fight back against this illogic. Located in the eucalyptus-lined streets of San Francisco’s Inner Sunset, Farma tinkers with food in the same spirit that the region's tech giants tinker with transformative technologies — in the hopes of building a better future. Since its doors opened to the public a few weeks ago, Farma has crusaded against the apocryphal purity of organic foods.
The chefs at Farma know that by embracing food technologies such as recombinant DNA, precision fermentation, and cell culture, food can become more nutritious and better for the planet. Through genetic engineering, researchers have developed Golden Rice which can help address the problem of vitamin A deficiency, cotton that produces its own insecticide, virus-resistant papayas, and more. Cell culture and advancements in plant-based food technology may soon make it possible to replace meat and other animal-derived products, thereby saving billions of animals from slaughter each year. And while the success of these foods depends on a variety of factors — such as legislation, marketing, data-driven research, taste, and cost — sure failure will come from misinformation.
The chefs combat this misinformation in the best way they know how — through direct culinary experience.
This month, Farma will treat diners to a Peruvian-inspired and citrus-forward menu, its colors echoing Farma’s pink marble floors and the resplendent warmth of its interior. The citrus has not only been chosen for aesthetics but also for its symbolism — that of grapefruit in particular, whose familiar presence in the breakfast fruit bowl belies a surprising origin story.
In the decades following the detonation of the atomic bomb, the world remained beguiled by the potential of atomic energy, especially in more peaceful and productive spheres. In 1959, a British scientist and nuclear enthusiast named Muriel Howorth started a network of “Atomic Gardening Clubs.” Chapters all over the world experimented by exposing seeds from various crops to gamma radiation in the hopes of developing new and valuable cultivars. It didn’t take long for this technology to make its way to grapefruit. By 1971, gamma rays had helped growers produce the “Star Ruby” cultivar — a fruit far redder and sweeter than its unirradiated counterparts. Fourteen years later, it was followed by “Rio Red.” Today, crosses of these breeds dominate Texas orchards.
That our beloved red grapefruit owes its origin to gamma radiation isn’t lost on Farma. In fact, it illustrates how we can enlist a novel technology to revitalize an old agricultural practice. It also highlights the degree to which happy accidents shape our food. Bombarding seeds with atoms in the hopes that they will positively transform the resultant fruit is by no means carefully controlled. However, neither is selectively breeding plants based on their outward characteristics. Such breeding may become controlled the more we select for and stabilize certain traits over generations, but initial experimentation involves a fair amount of random chance. By contrast, GMO food (which contains genetic material that has been meticulously sequenced and engineered) boasts far greater precision. We can be sure these foods are safe not because of many cycles of iteration but from an explicit understanding of their biology.
“We need to take back the narrative about GMOs,” says Farma’s founder, Ori Kagan. “Thousands of studies conducted over decades have underscored that GM food is safe. We’ve included several genetically modified ingredients on our menu today, such as the sugar beets that sweeten the sauces, the rosé pineapple in the ceviche, allergy-free peanuts in our dessert, and even the soy in the Impossible meat product that we use in our karaage.”
As customers savor these courses, it is not the molecular composition they think of, but the astonishing flavors; The plant cheeses are nutty, soft, and suffused with peppercorn. The karaage is salty, lightly coated in oil, and tossed in chili paste and muddled lemongrass — perfectly balanced by the beet-sugar sweetened aioli. The ceviche is lent a sweetness by the rosé pineapple and grapefruit, while the raw salmon contributes a gentle salinity. And the peanut brittle is rich and complex, offset by the umami of the toasted seeds and the floral vanilla of the ice cream. All is balanced, bright, and remarkably fresh.
The innovation at Farma goes far beyond flavor, however. While the food comes first, Ori and the servers are happy to remind customers of the various benefits that GMOs can confer — everything from making food more nutritious to developing crops that fare better in climatic extremes or optimize the land required for their production.
Take the papaya that Farma sources for their daiquiris, for example. As patrons watch the bartender add the brilliant peach-colored pulp into the cocktail shaker, they learn that these fruits are genetically modified for resistance against viral pests. The Hawaiian islands were beset by ringspot virus by the 1950s and within only 12 years, the amount of land used for papaya production dropped by 94 percent. Yields were devastated. Farmers who made a living off these fruits arrived at their groves only to find their crops misshapen and mosaicked with oily, rotting freckles. By identifying the genes responsible for the virus’ coat protein gene and inserting its DNA into the papaya’s genome, scientists were able to trick the fruit’s immune system into recognizing and defending itself against the virus. These ringspot-resistant papayas entered production in 1998 and resuscitated the industry.
Similar stories wherein genetic engineering for virus resistance help improve yields and protect stock have played out elsewhere, as with the New Leaf™ Y Russet Burbank potato engineered for resistance against viral infection. More are still unfolding.
In Central Florida, citrus farmers have been embroiled in a decades-long battle to plant engineered orange trees robust against various blights. One of these is “citrus canker,” a bacterial disease that causes the fruits to develop necrotic lesions. In a 2022 study at the University of Florida, researchers used CRISPR to produce several lines of Sweet Orange that showed no symptoms of the canker when injected with the disease-causing microbes.
A similar effort is underway with companies working on pathogen-resistant bananas. For the 400 million people worldwide whose livelihood and nutrition depend on the banana sector, rampant fungal blights such as tropical race 4 (TR4) could spell disaster. Scientists from multiple labs in Australia collaborated to make transgenic banana lines that appeared immune to TR4 at the end of a three year field trial culminating in 2017, but more testing must occur before any of these lines are commercialized.
Still, promising results such as these are worth investing in. The citrus industry in the U.S. is just over $3 billion dollars — profitable enough that the federal and Florida state government spent over $1.3 billion between 1995 and 2006 attempting to eradicate citrus canker alone. Bananas, a $44 billion industry and a key source of jobs, are even more valuable. In 2018, for example, the U.S. imported $2.8 billion worth of bananas, more than any other country.
Implementing transgenic lines that can safeguard staple crops and increase yields not only aids food security but also secures economic gains for massive global industries. A meta-analysis that looked at 147 original studies on the impact of genetic engineering on agronomy concluded that GM technology increased crop yields by 22 percent and increased farmer profits by 68 percent. This data disproves the horror story about GMOs’ devastating local economies peddled by their detractors.
Since conceiving of the restaurant in 2019, Ori felt it important that Farma’s menu be built with only the ingredients that are most optimized for planetary and human health. It follows that alongside GMOs, Farma emphasizes food technologies that decrease the volume of animal-derived products on the market. Whereas the production of livestock contributes to the rise of antibiotic resistance and consumes 80 percent of habitable agricultural land, cell culture can take place indoors, far closer to where the cultured meats will be consumed. It can also be done using only a tissue biopsy and synthetic growth media, limiting the opportunities for contaminants to pass between humans and animals. And while the overall climatic impact of cell culture over traditional livestock farming remains an open question, researchers have estimated that cultured meat could lead to a 7–45 percent reduction in energy use, a 78–96 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, a 99 percent decrease in land use, and 82–96 percent decrease in water use.
As the Earth’s population is slated to swell to nearly 10 billion by 2050, food and agricultural resiliency only grow in importance.
“Despite this increasing pressure, experimenting with how we feed people is not new,” Ori reminds us. “If our ancestors had not experimented with food, we would still be gnawing fibrous grasses for their scant vitamin content, struggling to feed our growing population, or perhaps would already have starved due to shortfalls, pests, or blight.”
And unlike our ancestors, Farma demonstrates that we no longer need to experiment blindly. Many of our earliest food innovations were the result of long-fought battles against nature: whether this meant learning how to selectively breed crops to feed burgeoning settlements or to develop pasteurization techniques to counter contaminants in a world where people no longer consume food immediately. Today, we have greater insights into the pathogens, chemistry, and molecules at work within the food we eat. The great irony is that this is especially true of food we have learned to manipulate at the cellular level: owing to extensive safety testing, we know far more about a cell-cultured salmon than we do about wild-caught fish hoisted out of a local river.
Even those who eschew GMOs in favor of organic foods would not choose ancestral or heritage bananas over those they currently eat. It is unlikely they would even recognize them. The first tomatoes were no larger than a pea. Ancient corn is inedible. Uncultivated nuts resemble small arboreal pebbles. In fact, it could be said that — insofar as virtually all food has resulted from arduous breeding and patient experimentation — virtually all restaurants embrace food technology. But what sets Farma apart from these is how it leans into this, recognizing that the only path towards a food-secure future is one in which biotechnological modification becomes the norm; a future in which our ability to manipulate biology in the pursuit of wellbeing truly goes from pharma to table.
Farma is currently fictive, but it needn’t be.
The food imagined for its menu is real. From their offices in a converted cannery in East San Francisco, a startup called Wildtype really does produce salmon, indistinguishable from real fish, through a method that does not require any animal-based cultures. They really do think it tastes best raw. Rosé pineapples, staggeringly beautiful and delicious, can be purchased anywhere in the U.S. Engineered beet sugar, soy, and papaya are also all available. And though it is not engineered, ultrasonically aged spirits are not the stuff of science fiction either. Elliot Roth, a biotech educator, is brewing up a batch of ultrasonically aged rum with his friends in a Bay Area coworking space as you read this.
It is important to know which tech-forward foods are already out there waiting to be embraced. It is also crucial to look at what is coming down the line, so supporters can champion and accelerate these efforts where they can: The peanuts in the brittle are still being developed, but the work is underway. A group called MyFloraDNA is using CRISPR technology to create non-allergenic peanuts by targeting the key proteins responsible for allergenicity.
We may one day be able to make food not only healthier but vastly more interesting. While in the past, a host might have planned a purple color-themed meal based around foods that already exist — eggplant, grapes, or plum, say — by 2056, a guest dining at Farma may be able to alert the chef in advance that it is her anniversary dinner and that her husband’s favorite color is blue. By then, the chef may be able to take genes from snapdragons that boost anthocyanin production — the pigments that make flowers deep purple or blue — and splice them into a vegetable of her choosing.1 Perhaps another guest, this one with a gluten allergy, may want to be able to enjoy a freshly baked baguette. They need only ask their server to incapacitate the genes encoding gluten proteins called prolamins.
In some cases, a combination of technological challenges and regulation impedes the innovation previewed on Farma’s menu. Identifying genes that cause allergies or transforming the colors, textures, or flavors of a specific food plant does not happen overnight. However, it would seem that, overwhelmingly, the lack of access to bioengineered foods is due to regulatory hurdles prompted by “ill-informed campaigns against promising new food technologies,” according to reformed anti-GMO environmentalist Mark Lynas. That the menu at Farma is missing Golden Rice Pilaf and cultured-meat bolognese points to sociocultural hurdles, not technical ones. The science is there. What remains is for consumers and food lovers to create the demand for these products, establishing an environment in which pro-food technology restaurants and grocers could thrive.
Postscript: We often talk about writing as manifesting here at Asimov Press, and in the case of Farma, we intend to do just that. We’re planning to make Farma’s menu real and host a dinner in the near future. While the first meal will have limited seats, please send us an email introducing yourself if you are interested in helping to source ingredients or visit as a diner: editors@asimov.com
Xander Balwit is editor-in-chief of Asimov Press.
Cite: Balwit, Xander. “Farma: Speculative Gastronomy.” Asimov Press (2024). DOI: https://doi.org/10.62211/23kk-94ut
Thank you to Niko McCarty, Devon Balwit, Itsi Weinstock, Will Shaw, Antony Kellermann, and Aryé Elfenbein for providing feedback on earlier drafts.
Plant breeders and biotechnologists have already used this method to create several strains of purple tomato. Snapdragons are a relative of tomatoes, which enables this splicing to work quite readily; as does the fact that tomatoes already naturally produce anthocyanin, which these genes merely boost.
I’m closely involved with Norfolk Healthy Produce (the company commercializing the bioengineered Purple Tomato). We would be happy to supply fruit for a dinner :-)
https://www.norfolkhealthyproduce.com/
Wow… great stack 💯🎯🍀 I learned quite a bit from it ✅